


Where Will I Go?

by 8sword



Series: His Fucking Kids [12]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Cas being the calm strict parent, Domestic Castiel/Dean Winchester, Domestic Dean Winchester, Gen, Kid Fic, M/M, emesis warning, sick Emma Winchester, stepsisters!Claire and Emma, totally unsympathetic Claire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-11
Updated: 2014-06-11
Packaged: 2018-02-04 07:56:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1771543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/8sword/pseuds/8sword
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean goes out to the Impala, and rifles through the bottom compartment in the trunk to see if he can find any antibiotics. He comes up with a half-empty bottle of doxycycline from 2009 and two white tablets rattling around in a shoebox that he thinks are just antacids.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Where Will I Go?

            "Thing 1 and Thing 2! If you're not downstairs in thirty seconds, you're walking to school!"

            Cas gives him an eyebrow as he comes outside with the trash. Dean flashes him a smirk as Cas sticks it in the garbage can and starts to roll it down to the end of the driveway. Then he thumps on the Impala's roof another time as he stands half in and half out of the driver's seat.

            "Girls! I'm not kidding!"

            "I'm _coming_!" comes Claire's shout through the open front door, followed by several thumps that are probably her huge-ass instrument case knocking holes in the foyer walls again. "Keep your thong on, jeez!"

            That kid's been hanging out way too much with Emma. Dean glowers a little, and goes around the car to open the trunk for Claire's case, tossing a wave to Cas as Cas heads back inside the garage. Cas smirks, a little, a smug _aren't you lucky to take the girls to school today_ smirk, and Dean flips him the bird as Claire huffs down the porch steps with her cello case.

            "Tell me again why you decided to switch from flute to cello?" he says as he turns, arms crossed over his chest, to watch her approach.

            "Because I said so," says Claire. The _if you've got a problem with it, you can take it up with my fist_ is implied in her tone.

            "Whatever," Dean says. "Where's the Emster?"

            "Still sleeping, probably."

            Dean huffs, stomps back up the driveway. He's all for Emma being like a human teenager and all that, but really, he could do without the whole sleeping in thing. If the girls are late to school, he'll have to go in with them to sign a tardy note to excuse them, and he really doesn't have the time for that today, what with half the people at the garage deciding to be off this week.

            He takes the stairs two at a time. "EMMA!" he bellows. "Come on!" Her door's closed, and he thumps on it with a fist.

            There's no answer. "I'm coming in," he warns, and waits a minute for an indignant "you better not!" from the other side. But there's no answer. He pushes the door open.

            There's still a lump under the covers. He glances around Emma's pig-sty of a room--the books and papers covering the desk, dirty clothes thrown across the floor, laptop cord snaking down from her nightstand--before he approaches, reaching for what looks like shoulder. "Hey. Kid."

            She doesn't grumble when he gives her a shake the way she usually does when he wakes her up. She just sort of curls tighter under the covers, and Dean realizes they feel kind of damp. And warm. He peels them back to feel her forehead, and hot and damp, too, her hair sticking to her skin.

            He hunkers down on his heels, bracing his elbow on the edge of her mattress. She makes a little sound and turns her head away from his hand, deeper into the pillow. Her scalp's hot and sweaty, too, the damp hair clammy against his fingers; even the curl of her ear is hot against his thumb.

            "Aw, kiddo," he says, soft, and she finally cracks an eye open, pulling her face out of the pillow weakly. Her face is seriously flushed, practically the same color as the skin around her eyes go when she's in Amazon mode, and she looks weirdly young, weirdly vulnerable.

            He pushes her hair back. "Looks like you're sick, Em."

            She groans and turns back into her pillow again. "Ungh."

            Dean chews on his lip for a minute. Then he rocks back to his feet and goes downstairs.

            "Hey," he says when he finds Cas in the back office, leaning over the printer. "Emma's sick."

            Cas straightens. His eyes flick in the direction of the staircase with that same look he always used to get when his angel blade was sliding into his hand, like he's preparing for combat with whatever bug Emma's got, or something. "Is she all right?"

            "Yeah, I mean--it's probably just viral." Dean scratches the back of his neck. "But I don't--I'm just going to call in. Do you have time to take Claire?"

            "I can call Stacy." Claire's come in, is leaning around the door. "She can give me a ride."

            Cas still looks troubled. "I could call in as well."

            "Uh, no you can't, it's evals week." Dean pushes him and Claire both in the direction of the door. "Go. Take Claire and get to work."

            "I said Stacy could--"

            "Stacy only got her license last week, you're not driving with her," Dean tells her. To Cas, he says, " _Go_. I'll call if we need anything."

            "My phone will be on vibrate," Cas says seriously. Then, as Dean pushes them both out the front door onto the porch: "I'll come home at lunch."

            Dean rolls his eyes. "Sure, sure, whatever. Go."

            He locks the door behind them. Then he hesitates in the hallway, testing the creak of his boots around his toes as they curl, uncurl. He thinks. Do they even have anything in their medicine cabinet? Anything that's not bandages or floss for stitches or triple-A ointment, at least? He doesn't think they do. He and Sammy used to have some antibiotics they carried around, when they could filch them, but any they had are probably long expired.

            He goes out to the car, anyway, and rifles through the bottom compartment in the trunk to see if he can find any. He comes up with a half-empty bottle of doxycycline from 2009 and two white tablets rattling around in a shoebox that he thinks are just antacids.

            Would antibiotics even work on Emma? he wonders. If they took her to the doctor--would they realize she's not, you know... _Homo sapiens_?

            He starts to freak out a little. Goes back inside with the bottle of doxycycline and starts heating up a package of that orange ramen Cas loves on the stove. It's not tomato-rice soup, but it's what they've got, at the moment, and he resolves to send Cas a text telling him to stop at the store on the way home and get some tomato soup.

            They don't have any trays, so he puts the bowl of soup on one of the wooden cutting boards, when it's done, and carries it upstairs that way, along with some ginger ale stirred flat in a glass. He isn't even halfway up the stairs when he hears retching.

            He takes the rest of the stairs two at a time, bursting into the bathroom. "Em?"

            She's curled around the toilet in her blanket. She's hugging the porcelain, panting, and she looks way out of it, eyes dazed and glassy. As Dean watches, she gives a shudder and starts to shiver.

            "All right," Dean says. He sets the soup down on the counter. He sits down on the edge of the tub next to her, but that feels too far away, so he slides down onto the floor next to her instead. He pulls her sweaty hair back from her face, combing it off her damp neck. It's soft, and wispy, and he's felt countless women's hair before, but touching his kid's hair is a completely different feeling. He feels protective, and useless, and Emma coughs, and leans against his knuckles.

            She throws up twice more, both times consisting more of yellow stomach juice than anything else. She starts to cry with the second one. Tears squeeze out of her eyes as she tries to breathe through the heaving and just chokes instead.

            Dean rubs her back slow, gentle, careful not to use too much pressure. Her blanket's slipped down, and she's shivering. He pulls it back up over her shoulders, one hand holding it in place and the other holding her hair back as she heaves over the bowl.

            When it seems like she's finally done, her head lolling down against the toilet seat, he creaks back onto his knees. Gets an arm under her legs, and she jerks, eyelids startling open. Her eyes are still bleary beneath them.

            "Hey," he murmurs. "Hey, hey, it's just me. Just Dad."

            She relaxes, a little, eyelids falling shut again. Dean carries her downstairs to the couch in the living room, arranging the pillows just so under her head and her side and tucking her in with the afghan hanging over the back. He goes to the kitchen to get a mixing bowl to put on the floor next to the couch, checking again to make sure she's propped up on her side in case she needs to throw up again. It's been so long since he had to do that for someone because they were sick, not because they were drunk, that it feels surreal, feels like at any minute he'll blink and it'll all dissolve. He'll be in a motel room, somewhere, face against a musty pillow, and the whole thing will have been just a dream.

            He waits there, hunkered down next to the couch, thumb resting against the pulse in Emma's temple, and nothing changes. Nothing disappears.

            He breathes, and goes back into the kitchen.

 

            Her throat _hurts_.

            She turns slightly in the heat around her. Sweaty and hot, and she tries to kick them off. Swallows, at the same time, and pushes her head back into her pillow at the pain.

            There's a voice coming from somewhere, and something cool on her forehead. She opens her eyes, swallowing again. She's in the living room. Cas is perched next to her on the edge of the couch, still in his school suit, and his head is turned in the direction of the kitchen as his hand rests light and cool against her forehead, thumb brushing her damp bangs back.

            She turns under his hand. He looks down at her, serious.

            "You're ill."

            Emma's too tired to say _no shit, Sherlock_. She shifts again, instead, trying to get the hot blankets off. Cas gets the message and slides off the couch, helping to untangle her from the afghan and her comforter.

            "No, she hasn’t thrown up anymore since then… I dunno, Amelia, how the heck am I gonna measure her blood pressure?" Dean comes into the living room, phone wedged between his shoulder and chin. He's got a glass of water in one hand and a thermometer in the other. Cas moves backward, out of the way, and Dean plonks down on the edge of the couch where he was. "Open up, kiddo."

            Emma opens her mouth. Dean shoves the thermometer inside with a lot more gentleness than his grumpy expression would suggest. It's cold under her tongue, and she almost feels like gagging but manages to keep it down by breathing deep through her nose.

            When it beeps, Dean takes it out. "101. Could be worse."

            Emma's cold again. She tugs the blankets back over herself and curls into the back of the couch, back to Dean. Cool fingers, too smooth to be Dean's, sift her sweaty hair from her neck and rest lightly against her carotid for a moment. She hears Cas murmur something to Dean, and Dean saying, "Cas says her pulse is fine. You wanna talk to him? You guys can hash out all your medical mumbo-jumbo."

            "Amelia," comes Cas's low voice a moment later, moving away, toward the other room. "She's not tachycardic. I don't think she lost too much fluid this morning, so we'll just…" His voice becomes inaudible. The weight is still on the edge of the couch. Emma shivers, just once, as a chill chatters through her. The afghan is lowered over her, again, and she falls asleep under the warm weight of a hand on her head.

 

            The next time she wakes up, the TV is on. It's on low volume and the SyFy channel, which means Cas must be in charge of the remote. She wiggles just far enough out of her blanket cocoon to see him in the armchair, computer in his lap.

            He glances over the tops of his reading glasses. Sees her looking at him. "Good morning."

            "What time is it?" she croaks.

            "Just after three." Cas shuts his laptop and gets up, crossing the room to her. There's a bottle of Claire's gross blue glacier Gatorade sitting on the coffee table next to some saltine crackers, and Cas cracks it open. "Drink this."

            She doesn't like Gatorade, but Cas doesn't look like he plans to take no for an answer. Emma swallows several gulps of it, comforting herself with the fact that at least Claire will be annoyed that her Gatorade has been stolen.

            "How do you feel?"

            She shrugs. She feels less hot-and-cold than before. Her stomach still feels tender, though, and pain throbs in her throat and the back of her head.

            "Dean managed to get you to take some acetaminophen an hour ago," Cas says. Emma has a vague memory of being coaxed to sit upright, and swallow. "Do you think it helped?"

            She nods, taking another sip of Gatorade. "Where is he?"

            "I sent him out until it was time to pick Claire up from school. He was getting rather…agitated."

            Emma shifts under her blanket. "He's mad?"

            Cas frowns. "Not mad. Agitated." He takes the Gatorade from her and hands her the sleeve of crackers.

            Emma plays with the plastic of the sleeve for a minute before opening it. "You came home early?"

            "Yes."

            "Sorry."

            Cas looks over his shoulder at her. His brow is furrowed. "There is nothing for you to apologize for, Emma."

             She squirms again. "You left work early."

            "And that was my choice." Cas studies her for a moment. "As it was Dean's. Do you understand?"

            Emma crams a stack of crackers in her mouth instead of answering.

            Cas sighs and takes the cracker sleeve back from her. "If I didn't know better I'd think you were trying to choke," he says dryly.

            Emma grins at him, open-mouthed, sprinkling crumbs onto the afghan. Cas sighs again and brushes them off.

 

            It's well past five by the time Dean and Claire get home. Emma's nodding off at the dining room table, having been forbidden by Cas to leave it until she takes the disgusting throat-numbing crap he put down in front of her in a little twenty milliliter cup. She startles awake at the sound of the door opening and Claire's voice saying, "I can't feel my fingers."

            She rubs her eyes as Claire trundles into the dining room, weighed down with several Walmart bags on each arm.

            She heaves them onto the table next to Emma's elbow. "Heard you barfed all over our bathroom, Sleeping Beauty."

            Emma glares at her. Cas goes, "Claire," all reproachful, from where he's taking Emma's sheets out of the dryer in the garage.

            "The hell?" Dean strides into the room, holding even more bags than Claire. He thunks them down on the table. "What're you doing out here? You should be resting."

            "I'm sick of the couch," Emma says sulkily. She surreptitiously hides the cup of throat medicine behind one of the Walmart bags.

            "You're sick, period. Go lie down."

            "Actually, her period was last week," Claire says flippantly.

            "I'm going to barf on everything you love," Emma says.

            "You're going to barf on yourself?" Claire says sweetly.

            Dean groans. "Out. Both of you."

            Claire smirks at Emma and heads upstairs. Emma drops her face back onto the table, feeling the cheap weave of the tablecloth against her hot cheek, and watches Dean unload what looks like an entire drugstore onto the table. There's Kleenex boxes and cough drops and bottles of Pepto-Bismol and ibuprofen and dramamine and several six-packs of ginger ale, each a different brand. The last bag he unloads is full of cans of tomato soup and a bag of rice. It's white, which is weird because Claire and Cas usually insist on brown rice. Emma pulls her blanket back over her head and squints at the rice, then up at Dean.

            "I figured we'd make soup." He moves to the stove to start a pot of water boiling. "For your throat. Tomato rice soup or something."

            Emma wrinkles her nose. "I don't like tomato soup."

            The slope of his shoulders stiffens. "Oh."

            "Emma." Cas comes in from the garage, folding her sheets. "It would likely be wise for you to eat what Dean thinks is best, as he has the most experience with human disease of all of us."

            Before Dean can say anything in response to this, footsteps thunder back down the stairs. "I just thought of something," Claire says. She looks at Emma. "You didn't get vaccinated, right?"

            Emma shakes her head under her blanket.

            Claire looks back at Dean and Cas. "What if she's got something serious? Like measles?"

            "She doesn't have _measles_ ," Dean says.

            "How do you know?"

            "Because I know measles, okay?" Dean waves his soup spoon. "I have seen measles, and Emma hasn't got measles." When Claire doesn't look convinced, he says, "She'd have a higher fever, and she'd have a rash. Em? You got a rash?"

            Emma peers down the front of her shirt, just in case. Shakes her head.

            "No rash," Dean says. "And she hasn't been coughing, and her eyes are fine. It's not measles. You haven't got measles," he says again, sternly, when Emma doesn't look reassured. "Sammy had measles, I know measles."

            Claire tilts her head. "How'd he get measles?"

            "He didn't have all his shots," Dean says gruffly. "But he's got 'em now, and we'll get Emma's after this, so will everyone please just sit down and let me make dinner?" He turns back to the stove, then spins and points at Emma. "Except you. Go back to the couch."

            " _After_ you finish your medicine," Cas says, looking pointedly at the cup of medicine still on the table.

            Emma drops her face back to the tablecloth again and groans.

 

            She hasn't been back on the couch long before she starts to feel queasy again. She draws her knees up to her chest and rests her forehead against them, closing her eyes as the Jeopardy music starts to play on the TV. The greasy smell of the grilled cheese sandwiches Cas is making to go with the soup is wafting into the room, and she holds her blanket over her nose, breathing her own sour throw-up smell instead.

            After a few minutes, she hears footsteps entering the room and stopping behind the couch. Dean's voice says, "How're you doing?"

            "Okay," she says, muffled. Then, "Kind of nauseous."

            "You wanna go upstairs?"

            She shakes her head.

            Dean's quiet. His footsteps move away, out of the room, and they're coming back inside, quieter like he's taken his boots off, and a weight's sitting next to her on the couch. A hand starts to rub her back, big circles.

            She mumbles, "What if I die?"

            Dean's hand stills. "What?"

            "What if I do have measles? Could I…"

            The hand starts rubbing her back again. "No."

            Emma chews on her lip. "Da--Dean?"

            "Yeah, kiddo."

            "When I die, where will I go?"

            His hand stops again. It seems heavier on her back for a minute, and it starts once more. "Heaven," he says firmly.

            She doesn't believe him. "Nuh-uh."

            "Yeah-huh," he retorts, mimicking her, and despite herself she almost smiles.

            "Do you really think so?" she whispers into her blanket.

            "You're not going anywhere you don't wanna go, Em," he says. "I won't let that happen."

            They sit for a minute. His arm holds her close.

            "What if I don't wanna go to school?"

            Dean snorts. "School doesn't count."

            "Yeah-huh."

            "Nuh-uh," he says, and Emma smiles for real this time.

            "I drank all of Claire's Gatorade," she confesses after a few minutes.

            "I know you did."

            "It actually tastes kind of good."

            "I won't tell her you said so."

            "Good." She lifts her head from his shoulder to spear him on a threatening look. "Because if you do I'll barf on everything you love."

            "There you go threatening to puke on yourself again," Dean says, and Emma beams.

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> For my dear loversforlycanthropes, who has been ill this week. (And who also hates how many references to bodily functions my writing contains--oops.) 
> 
> Humongous thanks, as well, for the tremendous response to "a place for us." I am so grateful to everyone for reading it.


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